We’re back! After a long hiatus due to professional/ life stuff, I’m happy to share with you my interview with Gary Shaw, Professor of History and Medieval Studies at Wesleyan University. Continuing our series on horses, we explore another angle of the long-standing relationship between humans and horses, looking at the role that horses played in human transportation and warfare. As we brace ourselves for the impact of A.I., I find it instructive to look back to a time when our transportation and military technologies depended on other animals. It’s impossible to fully comprehend the impact of the shift from horse and buggy to car, but, as we grapple with the scope and limitations of our humanity - and, I would argue, with our animality -, thinking back to a time when other animals were more fully embedded in our lives may serve as a useful counterpart and help us in our attempts to make sense of our present moment. In our conversation, Gary Shaw and I discuss two areas of his scholarship - the development of horse travel in twelfth-century Europe and the role that horses, such as the Duke of Wellington’s horse Copenhagen, played in battle during the period of the Napoleonic wars.

The title of Lydia Millet’s last novel - Dinosaurs - seems to wink at the threat of human extinction, and, yet, its explicit referent in the book is to birds, those sometimes-alien creatures who survived the impact of the asteroid that wiped out most of their kind. This kind of double meaning, something like a sign that points in multiple directions, abounds in Dinosaurs, which is at once a moving human narrative and a reflection on the ways in which our frailty puts us at the mercy of our shortcomings as a species but also, ultimately, serves as an opening to discovering how much we care about the natural world. It was, as always, a great pleasure to talk to Lydia Millet about these and other matters. I hope you too will enjoy our conversation.

A continuation of my earlier episode in which Trevien Stanger - instructor of environmental studies at St. Michael's College in Vermont - and I discuss Abram's book, which, I think it's fair to say, has had a profound effect on both of us. This time, we focus on Abram's argument about the impact of the invention of the alphabet on our relationship with the natural world.

If you'd like to listen to part 1 of this discussion - https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11992722

If you'd like to listen to my conversation with Johanna Drucker about the invention of the alphabet -
https://www.buzzsprout.com/356774/11826284